


cross my heart (and fight to live)

by Starrie_Wolf



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: AU, BAMF Peter Hale, BAMF Stiles Stilinski, Cryptic Alan Deaton, M/M, Magical Apocalypse, Peter just wants to know what's going on, Slight worldbuilding, Spark Stiles Stilinski, Steter Week 2018, preslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-28
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-17 15:18:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15464277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starrie_Wolf/pseuds/Starrie_Wolf
Summary: Peter awakens in the midst ofchaos.The last thing he remembers is fire, tongues of flames licking at the ceiling, until he can no longer feel the pain, no longer scream.He doesn't know how long it's been or what's going on, but he's going tofind out.





	cross my heart (and fight to live)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cywscross](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cywscross/gifts).



> cywscross suggested magical apocalypse and this happened -.-" so I named the fic after you for the hell of it.

Peter awakens in the midst of barely-controlled chaos.

He hears screaming, thin and high-pitched, a woman begging for her – no, her child’s life.

He smells _gunfire_ , the bitter taste of heavy metal on his tongue, of cyanide and silver and cold iron.

He swings his legs out of the unfamiliar bed, ripping wires from his arms. A mundane’s hospital, he notes, from the sharp scent of antiseptic and the beeping of machines in every room down the corridor.

He doesn’t know what’s going on yet, but he’s going to find out.

* * *

The hospital is filled with people screaming and running in all directions, which does not seem to be a usual state of affairs, even if Peter can honestly say he’s never been inside a hospital before today. Maybe he should’ve gone out the window instead.

The front door’s been smashed to pieces, glass littering the floor. And outside the door, there are… are those _revenants_?

Peter backs up a step before he quite realises he’s done it, claws popping out on instinct.

There’s a reason wolves only ever hunt revenants in _packs_.

“Hey – hey, you! Can you lift these?”

It takes Peter a moment to realise that someone’s talking to _him_.

There’s a woman – Senior Staff Nurse Melissa McCall, he notes, reading off her nametag – coming down the corridor, elbowing people out of the way and dragging two gurneys behind her. Maybe it’s the way she reminds him of Talia, confident and collected even with dead bodies literally flying past the windows, but Peter’s first instinct isn’t to bare his teeth at her.

He spares the gurneys a glance. Plastic and metal through-and-through; looks heavy, by the way the woman’s biceps are bulging with every step she takes.

He approves.

In lieu of a verbal response, Peter picks the first gurney up with one hand, and then nearly drops it because he can do it with three fingers. That’s… that’s not normal, at least not for a beta werewolf. He tosses the first gurney horizontally across the front door, and then stacks two more on top of it.

Immediate crisis resolved, he spins around. “What colour are my eyes?” he demands.

McCall blinks at him. “Blue,” she says. “Glowing blue. Is that normal?”

That can’t be right. That’s alpha-grade strength he’s displaying.

But also.

The alpha power didn’t come to him.

That means…

_One of Talia’s kids got out._

“It’s normal when you’re a werewolf,” he says absently, and then refocuses. The temporary barricade won’t hold the revenants for long; they have to figure out a way of killing them.

“You seem to be taking this quite well,” he notes, stacking a second row of gurneys behind the first. Perhaps they could leave through one of the ground-floor windows… that is, assuming there isn’t anything else out there. Peter’s never seen so many revenants in one place before; even the most powerful darachs don’t have this much magical power.

But then, beta werewolves shouldn’t be able to treat 300-pound weights like baseballs.

“I thought werewolves have red eyes,” McCall says, dragging several more gurneys out from a storage room.

“Only alphas have red eyes.”

It takes Peter a few extra seconds to realise what she just asked, and another to parse exactly what’s odd about that.

She’s not a shifter, he can tell immediately. Doesn’t seem to be a spark either, or a druid.

A hunter?

He spins around, claws lengthening, and _snarls_ in her face.

Her hands come up, heart rate skyrocketing, but there isn’t even the slightest twitch towards a concealed weapon.

No ingrained reflexes. Not a hunter.

Peter backs off.

“How do you know about werewolves?” he demands.

McCall snorts, although her heartbeat’s still rabbiting in her chest, he can hear it. “My son,” she says drily, “goes from gasping himself awake at night to high school lacrosse star almost overnight. I may not be a doctor, but I can tell something’s changed.”

Peter snorts too, despite himself. This is why he’s so against turning teenagers, he thinks. No iota of sense whatsoever.

Although, it sounds like whoever who’s turned her son didn’t seek parental permission first. Not always essential, especially if her son’s as ill as it sounds, but generally frowned upon if the child is underage.

“Who turned him?” he asks, out of courtesy than anything else. He wouldn’t be surprised if she tells him it’s one of Talia’s children. They can be awfully _uncivilised_.

“No idea.” McCall tells him, following behind him at a quick clip.

She’s so close to him that she almost runs into him when Peter stops. “No _idea_?” he repeats, incredulous.

She shrugs. “It’s a bite-and-run, from what Scott tells me. If it’s not for Stiles, we’d still be wondering why his eyebrows disappear and his eyes start glowing whenever he’s frustrated.”

A _rogue alpha_?

Revenants appearing in droves, rogue alphas roaming Beacon Hills, him displaying the strength and speed of an alpha werewolf.

Peter doesn’t like the picture these pieces of information paints.

He quickens his steps.

“Is Stiles a supernatural creature?” he asks, consideringly. Perhaps this Stiles might know what’s going on in Beacon Hills, might even know what happened to the rest of his family.

The room where he woke up seems to be at the back of the hospital, as far as he can tell. Peter peers cautiously out of the window, keeping his eyes and ears and even nose peeled for any hint that there’s something hidden out there.

He can taste the _danger_ in the air, but he can’t locate the source.

“He’s human, as far as I know.” McCall frowns, ducking obediently behind a chest of drawers when Peter gestures at her to.

Peter raises an eyebrow at her.

Not many people’s first thought jumps to _werewolf_ , even with the plethora of fantasy fiction available nowadays.

“Oh, no, that’s probably not Stiles’ first thought. Maybe fifth or tenth.” McCall shakes her head. “I love the boy like he’s my own son, but there isn’t anyone in this town who can keep up with him once he goes on an all-night research binge.”

Colour Peter intrigued.

* * *

He doesn’t hear the jeep before he sees it coming, careening down the road with no regard as to mundane traffic laws, which is absolutely unacceptable.

“Mom!” shouts a teenage boy, sticking his head out of the window on the driver’s side.

That’ll be the Scott she mentioned, then.

“Scott,” she calls back, and makes to climb out of the window before Peter grabs her shoulder and hauls her back, and not a moment too soon.

In the car, Scott swears loudly and yanks on the steering wheel, barely avoiding the jet of black goo the revenant spits at him. The jeep spins, but miraculously doesn’t upturn, wheels screeching over asphalt.

Peter can swear he hears someone else wailing about ‘my poor baby!’, but he’s too busy tracking the movements of the revenant, trying to determine if any of its fellows followed this one.

One revenant, even two, he can handle. Maybe even three, with his new strength and speed, but Peter doesn’t want to put it to the test if he doesn’t have to. There’s a reason newly-turned werewolves need a month of training before they’re allowed back into mundane society, and Peter isn’t so arrogant in his self-delusions to presume he can be exempt from the learning curve.

He thinks he can smell four – no, five – of them, and he’s but one adult werewolf. A revenant mob is the sort of situation in which Peter would hesitate to trust his own nephew at his back, never mind some newly-bitten teenager.

The revenants prowl out of the trees, one by one, boxing the jeep in.

He may be able to make a run for it, Peter calculates, depending on how long Scott and his passenger can hold the revenants off for, but he can’t be _certain_ –

– the jeep does a one-eighty, skidding to face the whole mob of revenants, and the door on the passenger’s side blows open –

– and every single revenant explodes into ash.

It’s so sudden that Peter rears back instinctively, bares his teeth in the exact kind of reaction he’s always scolded Laura for. What just…

McCall climbs out of the window, completely unafraid, and Peter honestly can’t tell at this point if it’s ignorance or confidence. He feels off-balance, and he _hates_ it.

A teenager tumbles out of the passenger’s side in an uncoordinated heap of gangly limbs.

“Mom!” Scott shouts again, flinging his own door open, throwing himself out of the jeep.

 _Definitely untrained_ , Peter notes, judging from the way he relies on his vision and not his other senses. Certainly not a threat to Peter.

Most of his attention’s on the first teenager, who’s carrying a lacrosse stick of all things, and certainly no more a werewolf than Peter is a bloodhound. Peter doesn’t know why, but there’s _something_ about this mundane that niggles at his attention, like a loose tooth one can’t stop worrying at.

“Get back in the car, Stiles!” Scott shouts.

 _Stiles_.

If Peter hasn’t been interested before, he certainly is now.

A human who just killed five revenants with what was definitely magic?

“Just a minute!” Stiles calls back. He’s poking at the ground with his stick, doing something with the revenant ash that Peter can’t see from this angle. He goes over for a better view.

Stiles spins around, nearly trips over his own feet, and would’ve fallen if Peter hasn’t shot out a hand to steady him. “What the hell, dude?” he demands, taking a step away, his heart hammering in his chest.

Peter doesn’t know how long ago was the fire, but it can’t have been so long ago that there’s now an entire generation of young untrained supernatural creatures running around. He swallows back his questions. He’s tired of not knowing what’s going on, but questioning a couple of mundanes is just going to lead to confused frustration all around.

And then Stiles’ eyes widen, and his heartrate ticks up, so high that Peter’s a little concerned for his health.

“You’re _Peter Hale_ ,” he breathes.

Peter has him slammed up against the side of the jeep before he quite realises he’s moved. He has to force his fingers to unclench from Stiles’ T-shirt, one by one, to make his shoulders drop and himself take a step backwards.

A blur of motion in the corner of his eye alerts him, and Peter shrugs Scott off, sending the teenager sprawling onto the floor. Inexperienced, all three of them, even if Scott’s glaring at him with eyes glowing crimson. Peter wonders who he’s managed to kill, and then wonders if it’s someone he knew, just so that he can laugh at their incompetency.

“How long ago was the fire?” he demands. He’s usually far more civilised than this, but he hasn’t even been awake for an hour, everything he’s ever known about the town he’s grown up in has changed, and his entire pack is _gone_.

“Three – no, four years ago,” Stiles corrects himself. His hands come down, slowly, although he stays plastered to the side of the jeep. “Look, dude, can we talk in the car? We really, _really_ need to get out of here before the rest of that pack comes –”

“Mob,” Peter corrects automatically, after a lifetime of teaching Talia’s children, even though they always whine _but Uncle Peter, who cares what a group of these is called as long as you know it’s a bunch of them?_

“A mob,” Stiles parrots obediently. “Of whatever these are –”

“Revenants,” Peter tells him, and finally relaxes enough to take another step backwards. Stiles is right. Now is not the right time.

“Yeah, okay, revenants, who’s going to realise at any moment now that some members of their mob are dead, which means we have to get out of here right _now_ –”

Peter leaps onto the jeep, uses the roof as a springboard, and in the same motion launches himself at the first revenant, tackling it away from the jeep.

“Holy _shit_ ,” he barely hears Stiles’ voice behind him, but he’s far too focused on the two revenants in front of him, on the third one still hiding in the shadows.

Scott snarls, a full-on alpha’s challenge, and the revenants in front of him freeze just a fraction of a second, just long enough for Peter to sink his claws into them.

 _Something_ blasts past him, a cyclone of pure magic, blowing the third revenant into dust.

“Get in get in _get in_!”

Peter spins around, hauls Stiles up by the collar of his T-shirt and throws him unceremoniously into the backseat. With his other arm he’s clinging onto the door, racing alongside the jeep until Stiles can scramble to the edge and let Peter climb inside.

“Punch it!” Stiles is screaming.

Melissa punches it.

Peter nearly goes through the rear windshield; he barely catches himself in time, braces himself against the driver’s seat, and catches Stiles with his other hand.

“Thanks,” Stiles manages to gasp out. Peter hopes that he’s not about to go into cardiac arrest in the backseat; human heart rates _shouldn’t_ go that high.

He thinks.

He doesn’t know anymore.

Immediate things first.

“Where are we going?”

“Deaton’s,” supplies Melissa, when it looks like both Scott and Stiles are panting too hard to answer. The look she flicks him in the rear mirror is calculating. “You know him?”

Peter lets go of the driver’s seat, slumping into the backseat.

“Of course,” he says drily. “He’s – used to be, I suppose – the Hale Pack Emissary.”

* * *

“Peter,” Deaton says with no little surprise. “You’re awake.”

Peter has to resist the uncharacteristic urge to shake Deaton until he gets some answers out of him.

“Alan,” he greets. “I hear it has been four years.”

Deaton inclines his head in agreement. “My condolences for your loss,” he says gravely.

“I have also been given to understand that some members of my family survived the fire,” Peter tells him bluntly. With Deaton, it’s best not to let him beat around the bush, or they will be circling around the topic all night.

Deaton nods, slowly, but doesn’t proffer a name.

“Who?”

“Laura and Derek.” Surprisingly, it’s Stiles who answers, and not Deaton. Peter doesn’t care, as long as he _does_ get some answers. He exhales slowly. Laura and Derek. Two out of eleven – three, including him.

“Where are they now?”

Deaton shakes his head. “I am sorry, Peter –”

“New York,” Stiles interrupts. “At least, that’s what Laura left on the forwarding address –” he shuts up when everyone’s eyes snap to him, cheeks turning a little pink.

It takes Peter another moment to remember what else he was about to ask.

“Exactly what is _going on_?” he demands.

“It’s a long story,” Deaton begins, at the same Stiles says, “It’s the apocalypse.”

They both stop, and stare at each other.

Peter feels the sharp tip of a canine prick his lip. This is why it’s Talia or her husband always deals with Deaton. Peter doesn’t fancy himself an impatient man, but Deaton’s cryptic attitude even in an emergency tries his patience.

“ _What_ ,” he growls, his throat rumbling, “ _is going on_?”

The question’s addressed to Deaton, but he’s looking at Stiles, and so he catches the moment Stiles swallows, a gulp barely audible except to a werewolf’s hearing.

“It – it all started last month?” Stiles’ tone lilted up in a question, and he glances over at Deaton for confirmation. “We didn’t know anything until I overheard on my Dad’s radio one night that there’s a dead body in the woods, so Scott and I sneaked out to investigate, right –” he shrinks a little at the look Melissa sends him “– except Scott got bitten by this gigantic wolf, but the next morning there’s nothing there, not even a scar.”

A werewolf bite, Peter recognises.

“And that’s pretty much the start, and then everything started going crazy, supernatural creatures coming out of nowhere, everything’s trying to eat us, we had these… flying three-headed things try to eat everyone in the middle of gym class, Finstock was so _pissed_ that lacrosse practice had to be cancelled that afternoon –”

“Beacon Hills sits upon a leyline nexus,” Deaton interrupts, looking at Peter.

Peter nods. It’s the reason why the Hale Pack is established in Beacon Hills, after all; to ensure the nexus is protected from those who would seek to use it for evil.

“Laura left for New York within weeks of the fire. The Nemeton has been left unguarded since then.” Deaton’s voice held no censure, but Peter could sense the weight of an accusation nonetheless.

Peter can guess what happened next, then. “Someone bound it to their will,” he summarises. Exactly the sort of thing his Pack was put in place to prevent, sixteen generations ago.

Deaton shakes his head. “No.” He pauses, as though he’s trying to consider how to phrase his next sentence. “Someone uprooted it.”

For a moment, Peter thinks he’s heard wrong. “ _Uprooted_ it,” he repeats. A glance at the others tells him that it’s exactly what they heard, too, but he still can’t quite believe his ears.

A Nemeton is the physical manifestation of a magical conflux. To uproot one – to _destroy_ the entire conflux… and the Beacon Hills Nemeton being the primary centre of confluence for the North American continent…

Stiles’ description is oddly apt, he thinks. “Someone started the magical apocalypse.”

“In a sense, yes.” Deaton’s gaze is grave. “There’s been a magical backlash worldwide. Anyone with latent powers in their bloodline awoke almost overnight, and even born supernatural creatures suddenly find themselves unable to control their enhanced powers.”

Revenants flocking in mobs, Peter thinks. Himself displaying the strength expected of an alpha werewolf, young untrained supernatural creatures out on the streets.

And he’s only been awake for an hour.

“The hunters,” he hears himself say distantly. “What about the hunters?” He knows, possibly better than anyone else here, what fear of and discrimination against the supernatural can make mundanes do.

By the grim look on Deaton’s face, Peter can tell he’s hit the nail on the head.

“All the big cities are under military quarantine,” Stiles pipes up. “Nobody in, nobody out.”

There are fewer supernatural creatures in the cities, Peter can tell them. Too much pollution, not enough nature, it offends the wild magic within them. He doesn’t say it, because from the looks on their faces, they already know.

City-wide extermination.

How soon before the first extermination force reaches Beacon Hills? Peter would be surprised if Gerard Argent himself isn’t already making his way down.

“So we’re going to make Beacon Hills the opposite of that,” Stiles is continuing, and Peter can’t stop the brief widening of his eyes. “We’re going to turn into it a haven for supernatural creatures.”

Stiles tips his chin up, and Peter can see it in the glint of his eyes, the way he bares his throat to Peter without hesitation – even if Stiles likely doesn’t grasp the significance of it.

“Are you in?”

He doesn’t trust Deaton as far as he can throw him. He doesn’t know where the scattered remnants of his Pack are. But Stiles – Stiles is honest, and brave, and powerful, and truly believes what he’s saying. Peter’s done worse with less on the line.

“I’m listening.”


End file.
